Most infants experience difficulty in attempting to grip a conventional feeding bottle because of the bottle's substantially smooth and generally cylindrical configuration. More particularly, the circumference of the bottle is usually too large for the baby to grip with his or her small hands. Thus, come feeding time, the baby cannot feed himself or herself with such a bottle unless he or she is assisted by an adult. The baby's need for assistance poses a problem not only for the baby, but also for the adult.
Attempts to overcome the problem described above have included baby bottles equipped with handles. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,570,808 discloses a baby bottle having a central opening traversing the intermediate portion of its body, thus forming two handles for the baby to grasp. By narrowing the intermediate portion of the body, the cross section of the handles is reduced, thus allowing the baby to grasp the handles with greater ease. In another embodiment, the cross section of the body is triangular with three handles being formed by concavities therein, sections, rather than by one central opening.
In U.S. Pat. No. 4,557,392, a baby bottle is disclosed which has two handles projecting from opposite sides of the bottle. Each of the handles includes a hand-grip portion spaced from the sidewall of the bottle so as to facilitate gripping by a baby.
Baby bottles with handles are much easier for a baby to hold than conventional baby bottles. However, even such non-conventional bottles have not, in the past, fully resolved the baby's problem of grasping them due to the fact that they must be placed in a particular orientation in order to be gripped by the baby (i.e., with at least two of the handles extending in a direction generally perpendicular to the baby's forward line of sight so that the baby can grip one handle with its left hand while simultaneously gripping the other handle with its right hand) and due to the further fact that many babies are incapable of orienting the bottles on their own. Because of the need to properly orient the known baby bottles with handles, such bottles still require adult assistance in many instances (i.e., in those instances in which the bottle is not properly preoriented relative to the baby). Without such preorientation, the known baby bottles with handles would be as difficult for the baby to grip as the conventional baby bottles without handles.